BF3 Close Quarters DLC isn’t as small as you think

We were wondering when EA were going to release some brand new Close Quarters gameplay footage and they have somewhat delivered. The upcoming DLC expansion is being shown at the PAX East expo and we have some off-screen footage from the Ziba Tower map for you to feast your eyes on.

To give you a recap, Ziba Tower is one map of a confirmed four maps as part of the Close Quarters pack. As the name suggests, gameplay will take a focus on more confined gameplay and we won’t be seeing any vehicle combat or large scale maps.

What we will be getting though is 10 brand new weapons to play around with, weapons which will once again need to be unlocked via assignments just like the Back to Karkand pack. In the previous look at Ziba Tower, DICE gave us an example of how you’ll be able to play Ziba Tower on a variety of levels, in a hotel-style complex. The new footage from PAX East features more of the same of this, although unfortunately the gameplay we see does not include any of the fantastic destruction elements as seen in this EA teaser here.

The gameplay is obviously taken from the PC version of the game as seen by the keyboard and mouse player at the start of the clip and the visuals in general look very crisp indeed. One point that we do want to mention though is that Ziba Tower doesn’t exactly look like a small map. A lot of people are going pretty nuts about EA choosing the ‘COD route’ with Close Quarters, but the fact that you can take the action to a variety of destructible floors provides a fresh experience that players will grow to love. Being able to shoot players above or below you as well looks particularly exciting in our opinion. There’s a lot of negativity at the moment over the pack, but don’t forget that the footage seen has only come from Ziba Tower – we still have three other maps to see and they could be completely different.

It goes without saying that it is unlikely that we’ll see this level of quality on console, but we just hope that DICE won’t sacrifice too much in their mission to make the console versions as impressive as possible.

Take a look at the new footage for yourself and let us know what you think of it. Hopefully it is just a taster of good things to come later this week if EA decide to release some official footage for us.

Will you be picking up the Close Quarters Expansion pack at the first opportunity, or are you angry with DICE at the moment over the current state of the game following on from the big patch updates and new Rent a Server options?

The biggest concern I have for the Close Quarters DLC, from a PC player perspective, is that this Ziba Tower map is limited to 16 players or at least what they keep showing is the 16 player version of this map. With the PC version of the game the understood default of small maps, outside SDM, is a 32 player maps. So this 16 player map doesn’t even reach that. What this causes is an issue with server populations. No server owner will want to handicap their 64 or 32 player servers with a 16 player map in it’s rotation. To have the game kick out 16 or even 48 players from their server because a 16 player map is on their server is not only bad from a server population expectation but also bad for it’s reputation. So it’s in the best interest of the PC server owners to never have this map in their rotation which means this DLC will fail in the PC community if there is not at very least a 32 player version of all 4 of these maps. Outside of that the map looks fine. I don’t see anything wrong with the size now that we were able to traverse all of it in this new video.

Graham

I think what will happen in the scenario that you have described — is that servers should limit themselves to the Close Quaters gameplay types and set a max of 16 ppl on the server. it comes down to server Admins if they are not managing their rotations either have Squad DM (16 player Max) + CQ games and simply take large scale conquest maps out.

Ideally you would run a 2 servers with different settings — just my 2cp

Onechiltern

Just got into battlefield as I’m bored with COD,now I understand EA are going to skank us like Activision…great you set of Skanking twats! Greed,pure greed!!!

T-wholf

u just started BF3 and now u bitching… shut ya mouth and go back to COD

CHAINSAW305

im with graham on that! just set ur server to close quarter map styles or a cap of 16 players…and like my boy t-wolf say “go b ack 2 cod and stop b1tchn!”